5 out of 5

Producer: Simple Kid

Label: Vector Recordings

Yes, the dude’s wearing a trucker hat and the album reeks of cool-of-the-month club.  Yes, the lyrics fall apart at moments if you’re listening too closely.  But damn if Ciaran McFeely – Simple Kid – doesn’t make an awesome pop album, nabbing the best moments of Blur without their sometimes short-sighted brevity or long-windedness.  It helps that McFeely’s sound feels familiar to him – producing his own work, this might’ve been a bedroom production but you get the feeling that Ciaran’s been twiddling the knobs on this for a while to get it to sound the way he wants, which is punched up with a modern cleanliness that lets the various instrument and vocal tracks ring out with perfect levels and at just the right moments to punctuate a beat or a line.

I was expecting to hate this album due to the press it got, but it ended up catching my ear from track 1.  More importantly, the rest of the tracks caught my ear.  If you can manage to keep me singing along for a whole album’s worth of songs, I don’t care if you’re Britney Spears (note: she hasn’t made a whole album of songs I want to sing along to), you’ve made a 100% awesome contribution to my music world.